Bloody Hell

Last Saturday, after my friends and I watched The Lives of Others, the issue of education came up during dinner. It was kinda unavoidable: three out of four friends recently enrolled in a Master's degree at either UNSW or USYD. One of us, a manager at KPMG, is doing it because her boss wants her to; Another, a film professor at UNSW, is resuming Law School again after discontinuing it in undergraduate; and I am doing it to change career.

A few Highlights from that night's discussion:

1. Highly intelligent people do exist: the professor is teaching full-time, and studying full-time, taking 5 units of studies this semester. ( I am only taking 4, and I am not doing anything else) When we asked her how she manages it, she casually said:"Oh, I just have to work harder."

2. Tuition's too high: to complete a double degree at the new Medicine School at UNSW, you need $ 370,000 Australian dollars (For a local student)

3. While Australia spends billions of dollars on the Iraq war, education funding is being cut, and international students are herded like cash cows.

4. Something we long suspected has been proved true: the international student office encourages lecturers to pass international students even when they should fail.

5. USYD courses too theoretical (read: useless). My Management Communication class focuses too much on boring academia readings instead of real world scenarios. The lecturer is a linguist who's never worked in a company. This class sucks.